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Romney victory hinged on Oakland County support -- and his father's untainted legacy

Mitt Romney won the Michigan Republican primary on Tuesday, which was exactly 44 years to the day his father officially ended his bid for the GOP nomination in 1968.

George Romney, after his infamous August 1967 brainwashing comment to interviewer Lou Gordon (link), faded in the polls behind former Vice President Richard Nixon, who would stampede past limp challenges by Nelson Rockefeller, Ronald Reagan and Jim Rhodes in a '68 primary season that didn't include a vote in Michigan.

Romney ended his candidacy on Feb. 28, 1968.

At the Republican convention in Miami that year, Nixon chose Maryland Gov. Spiro Agnew as his running mate, but some pushed instead for Romney, who was viewed as a moderate, established candidate, for the veep slot.

Agnew's disgrace and resignation in 1973 would pave the way for Nixon's shameful departure the following year. Perhaps Romney would have provided some moral and ethical backbone of the Nixon administration, but probably not.

Instead, Nixon appointed him to run HUD on the periphery of the administration, which benefitted Romney and his legacy by keeping him away from the monstrous network of criminal corruption from the White House. (The appointment also put William Milliken in the governor's mansion until 1983).

That Romney was untainted -- only political historians and wonks recall his issues at HUD -- allowed his son to freely use the family legacy in a whirlwind series of campaign stops across metro Detroit over the past week, as he tried to fend off the possibly fatal catastrophe that would have been losing Michigan.

Mitt Romney, who was born in Detroit and grew up in Oakland County, won the state by three percentage points yesterday, thanks mainly to support from the Detroit area. He picked 41 percent of the Michigan vote to the former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum's 38 percent.

The 99 percent of precinct results, Romney had 410,517 votes to Santorum's 378,124.

Romney had the backing of much of Michigan's GOP party apparatus and the local business community (link), which gave him much of the $1.6 million he raised in the state.

In solidly Republican Oakland County, where Romney grew up, he won 74,030 (50.3 percent) votes. Santorum was second with 42,465 (28.9 percent), Ron Paul third at Paul 16,498 (11.6 percent) and Newt Gingrich with the booby prize, 9,632 (6.5 percent).

In Wayne County, Romney had 49,280 (41.6 percent), Santorum had 39,287 (33.2 percent), Paul has 19,310 (16.3 percent) and Gingrich had (6,965).

Macomb County, home of the fabled Reagan Democrats, Romney was also the winner with 37,838 (43.3 percent) votes. Santorum had 30,218 (34.6 percent), Paul had 10,245 (11.7 percent) and Gingrich was in fourth place with 6,338 (7.2 percent).

All of those numbers are with 100 percent of the precincts reporting.

The national media narrative today is largely trying to decide what the Michigan result means. One theme is that is that President Obama was the real winner because Romney struggled to fend off Santorum in his home state.

With nine months remaining before the general election, the long-term effect of the Michigan primary fight is debatable — especially in the age of social media and a real-time news cycle that never ends while churning out endless stories that have unknowable shelf lives for a public whose attention span is best described as mercurial.

In other words, a lot can (and probably will) happen before Nov. 6.

The surefire winner was the various television stations that benefited from a windfall in campaign television advertising.

Through last week, more than $6.5 million had been spent in Michigan on TV commercials by Romney, Santorum and their proxies (link). The total may have been higher by the time the polls closed yesterday.

Much of the money was unexpected because of the early assumption that Romney would easily win him boyhood home state, and the other candidates would both to challenge him here.

Michigan is expected to be a key front in the fall general election campaign, with Obama and the eventually GOP nominee launching volleys of commercials at each other, and that means more spending on commercials — and local airwaves flooding the political messages at all hours. -- Bill Shea